He emphasized the importance of the Pryor pipeline to StateImpact in November, and said having the water treated and piped in couldn’t be a permanent situation.

“It’s about 30 miles to pump the water to the community. That’s our sole source. Almost 100,000 people relying on a 30 mile pipeline that was aging,” Schwab said.

StateImpact spoke with Schwab for a story about construction at Broken Arrow’s new reservoir and water treatment plant, which will at least alleviate reliance on the Pryor pipeline. It just wasn’t finished in time to mitigate the effect of this week’s leak.